From Pay Transparency to Shared Leadership, Erin Agdinaoay on WPA’s Model

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast where we find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. I'm your host, Evelyn Lee, an architect who spans tech as an angel investor, startup advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're a seasoned architect or just starting in the field, this podcast is your gateway to think differently about the role architects play within our global community. Hello disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Today we're taking a closer look at a firm that's redefining what transparency looks like in architecture. My guest, Erin Agdinawai is an Associate Principal at Work Program Architects, or wpa. An award winning practice known for its community driven design and radically open culture.

A Aaron has helped shape WPA's approach to radical transparency where open books, salary visibility and shared decision making aren't just ideals, they're how the firm operates every day. From inviting new hires to see the firm's full salary structure to creating a rotating raises and bonus committee, WPA is challenging the old rules of firm management and proving that openness builds trust, equity and resilience. We'll talk about how Erin's People first leadership style, combined with her advocacy for equity and pay transparency has helped foster a culture where everyone, from interns to principals thinks and acts like an owner. Join us as we explore how radical transparency is changing what it means to work in an architectural practice. Hi Erin, welcome to Practice Disrupted.

B Hi Evelyn, thanks for having me.

A So we are here to talk about Work Program Architects. Do you guys go by Work Program Architects or wpa?

B So locally we just go by WPA because it is much easier to say and once people get to know us they also start saying wpa. So you can say WPA for the sake of the podcast.

A And you know we, we did a little bit in the intro talking about what makes WPA unique. But why don't we start a little bit about your career path and then how you found your way to wpa?

B Yeah, sure, I would love to. So I did not. I was not one of those people that always knew I wanted to be an architect. That is actually something I found in high school just because I loved learning. I loved everything so much I had a hard time choosing. I thought architect was. Architecture was one of those professions that dabbles into all sorts of things and if you just love learning, you learn so much from your clients. And my AP Art history teacher actually got me very excited about the profession and I said, you know what, this is it for me.

B And I took A very traditional educational path into architecture. I went to Virginia Tech and did the five year professional bachelor's program there while I was in school. I was very fortunate that I was able to have an internship close to home every summer and winter break at a large firm. And my fourth year I also did a program in Chicago called the Chicago Studio at Virginia Tech. And it was very formative to my professional experience. When I graduated from Virginia Tech, instead of going to a large city, I decided to go back to my hometown, which is the Chesapeake Norfolk area of Virginia. We're in the southeast portion of the state. Because I just really valued wanting to get license as soon as possible.

B I saw a lot of women in the profession and minorities, unfortunately, if they sometimes went to these larger practices, got really invested in the daily grind and the firm did not help them prioritize licensure. And so I really wanted to make sure I started off with that. And I had a great relationship with the large firm I interned at. They knew I wanted to get licensed and so I came back there, worked there for about four and a half years after school. And around that time I I got my license share. I was about a year into being licensed, working on a project and I was working in an education only studio and I got hungry for more. I wanted to also have do more work that more directly impacted my communities. And I heard Mel, our CEO and one of the co founders of wpa speak at multiple events.

B And every time I heard her talk, I got very interested in community invested work. And one time I got very bold and just told her after one of her lectures, I said hey, your work and the firm's work is so inspiring. I think what you do as a leader of wpa. I would love to work at WPA in the future if an opportunity comes up. And I was expecting just a thank you and nice to meet you. And she actually said. And so I sent her an email and it took some time, but eventually she called me in and we had a conversation. And I loved everything I learned about wpa, not only in their community driven work, but in their radical transparency and financial transparency.

B And I knew that's where I wanted to go next. And so I jumped firms and was WPA's 13th employee and now we're at 26.

A Wow, double the size.

B Yeah.

A So talk about your first experience learning about their radical transparency and what does radical transparency really mean to WPA?

B My first experience with WPA's transparency was actually while I was being interviewed. They talked about being a transparent firm. And then my second interview, they said, by the way, financial transparency at WPA means we're 100% open books and we want to move forward and bring you on board if you still want to work here. And so we're going to show you this Excel sheet that has everyone's salaries. You're going to look at it, we can talk about it, and then we're going to ask that you give us an offer for what salary you want to start here? Oh, yeah. It was a surprise. I think my first reaction was, oh, wow. But then I was like, this is so cool.

B She quickly followed up by saying, you know, we can talk about. You don't have to necessarily tell us right now. You can go home, think about it, and then shoot me an email. And so we got to go through the list of the 12 other people that work there, what their roles, responsibilities were, how long they've been in the profession, were they licensed or not. And so naturally, I kind of. We helped narrow down about the two people that were closest to my years of experience and the roles and responsibilities. I was coming on board as a project architect and a project manager. I sat with it and I was thinking through salary in terms of, okay, this is a firm that is 100% transparent all the time.

B So I need to be cognizant and really honest with myself and as to how I. What value I think I bring to the firm and how it fits into this structure that is established to help be a part of it and not necessarily disrupt it in an unproductive way. And so from there, I was able to propose a salary and it, it worked out.

A So they walked you kind of through what range you might be at given your experience and the roles and responsibilities, or you were able to at least have that conversation with them.

B Yeah, I was able to have that conversation with them. I will say right now, we definitely, we still keep a lot of parts of this process. At the time, it was much more. They truly wanted to hear what I had to say without too much of their influence. When I started the hiring process and how financial transparency folded in, we weren't yet tracking against the AA compensation report we've iterated since I've joined the firm and of course, how it existed before me, that now we have a lot more data that we've made it a very much more approachable process. Hiring is always very awkward. I usually start off with a phone call saying, hey, thank you for applying. We're interested in your application.

B Just want to cover a couple things before we go into, deep into the hiring process. And so I make sure they know that we're 100% salary transparent firm because there's some people that are very excited by that and there's also people that may not be comfortable by it. So I'd rather start off with that before we all get very invested in the process. And then when we get far enough and we say, yeah, your work sounds great, you're a great culture fit, we walk them through. We have this Excel sheet we track against every AIA compensation report. We also as a firm fill out the survey because we very much believe in that data collection and everyone is tied to a job role or a series of job roles. With our size of a firm, it's pretty normal to wear multiple hats. So we think through like, how much of your time are you spending each role? We take the information from the compensation report to see how we're all doing, making sure people are within the bands.

B If as a firm we're financially doing well enough to get people into the bands or top ends of the band's average level of the bands. And so now when people come to WPA and are interviewing when we get to that stage, I prep the sheet to kind of say, here's where we think you are. Based off our conversation so far. You are, as an example, you know, an architect one which puts you in these ranges in the compensation report. And also employee A and employee B are close matches to where you would be coming in. What do you think? And then we have the conversation. So it looks a little bit different now just because we've added more data, but it's still very much in the spirit of when I came on as employee number 13.

A Talk to me a little bit about the importance of salary transparency because it's not necessarily just like, oh, everybody is on a level playing field. I think there's a deeper value set that goes into why you would even make that process so transparent in the first place.

B Yeah, I do know that when Mel founded wpa, a lot of it was to design a firm in which people think if you don't have salary transparency, people just won't talk about it. And I think the reality is actually when it's a long night and it's a deadline, people are going to naturally talk about things. And if they don't understand why something is the way it is, people tend to default to the worst case scenario or assuming ill intent. By being salary transparent. For us, it takes a lot of that off the table. It allows open and Direct conversations. When we tie it also to the fact that everything on Our server is 100% open books, from our budgets to our monthly invoicing, our performance, our profits. It lets people learn to connect the dots between their salary, their role on a project, their role in the firm, to firm performance.

B We have found, and it was also our hope that by having this at wpa, people naturally start behaving like firm owners, which is really awesome. And it has actually allowed us to then design our own employee ownership structure. Because if everyone's behaving like owners, everyone has access to information. It creates this long Runway to have more business acumen, firm leadership acumen, no matter how old you are, no matter how many years of experience you have. And that long leadership Runway allows people to have the opportunity to understand how firms work and to be stronger future leaders.

A You know, I often hear that one of the reasons why nobody really is shown their full billable rate sometimes is because they look at it and then they originally, you know, they immediately go back to, why am I only getting paid this much when you're billing me out here? I'm imagining that there are some professional development or financial literacy that comes along with not just having access to the open books, but really understanding what it is. And is that in house for you all? Is that, go read these books, take these courses, you know, we'll answer any questions. How does that evolve?

B So it definitely starts off in house or is mostly in house through an exposure of being brought into the process. For us, like every Tuesday, we have an all firm studio meeting. And the topics can vary, but if there is something to talk about financially, we'll talk about it. For example, we do quarterly financial reports. We walk through our budget and how we're doing during that quarterly report out. And if we're on target or front end, on target. And part of our radical transparency is we'll celebrate the wins. We'll be so excited to celebrate wins.

B But if things aren't going as expected, we also openly talk about that small businesses naturally have their ups and downs. And I think it's very important for everyone to know that, know how the firm works through it. And while we talk about it, I think we're very honest when we, when there's uncertainty in what we're doing to help mitigate it, what we're tracking, what we feel really good about, maybe what we feel less good about. And so it starts with exposure to those types of things. Everyone also gets to have an opportunity to be on our raises and bonuses committee It's a committee that rotates year after year and that's a deeper dive into our firm budget for salary, bonuses and hiring. So everyone gets to have that opportunity to be on that committee to look at that. We also then if you are more curious, you know, someone can say I'm very interested in understanding how we track accrual versus cash. And we'll say, okay, let's take some time aside and go through that in deeper dive.

B Everyone gets a broad spectrum. Look at it when we do annual budgets or when we do our quarterly report out. But if someone raises their hand and says they're really interested in it, then, then we'll say, okay, here's a book list, let's have a lunch conversation about it. So that's a lot of what it can look like, but it's just embedded in our day to day.

A I'm also interested in this comment that you made about how more individuals start acting like owners. Can you help me dig into that a little bit? So in what way I guess are they acting? Especially along the spectrum, you know, is it the younger people that are asking different questions? Is it middle management that's really stepping into better roles and leading more? Can you describe a little bit how that shows up?

B Of course. Well, younger people, I argue, are the most curious, which is super exciting because I think what attracts them to us is when they know that we're radically transparent. Because I think our younger generation right now is inherently very, very curious and demanding of more transparency in any institution they want to work for and make sure there's a strong alignment to their own personal values. With younger people, what we see is a curiosity of am I spending the right amount of time on this and understanding more and having access to, oh, we made a profit during this phase, but not this phase. Is there a more efficient way or creative way we can look at getting these tasks done that we're maybe done in a more typical fashion? They help ask questions. So even though someone else is a project manager, maybe I'm their project manager and I think I know the way to get a delivery done. Because my, because of our younger staff that are on our team have that curiosity, understand our transparency, feel invested in our goals because they've heard us talk about our goals, want to be part of that profit because that means the pots bigger for raises and bonuses next year. They then come to the table, say, Erin, have you thought about doing it this way? Or hey, I was researching, there's this new technological tool that can actually create these diagrams faster or we can manipulate the design of this building skin parametrically to save time.

B They're the ones that really bring that to the forefront very early on, even if it's only their first year at wpa. And it just grows from there with maybe middle management, which, you know, 26 people, there's really not much middle management, I would say behaving like owners looks like. And a lot of it is because of the opportunity we provide. Choosing their own consultants that for fee proposals, writing and signing their own fee proposals, leveraging relationships they've already built, feeling empowered to do so. And we have found that because they're empowered to create their own deadlines, choose their own consultants, it just creates that through line for that transparency to dissipate down in a very communicative way to then also feel empowered and feel very tied to the work to create good results or question and make sure we're not just doing things the way we've always done it.

A That's super helpful. I feel like those are outcomes that you never would necessarily consider as a result of what it means to be radically transparent. What is hard about being radically transparent?

B I think there's a lot of things that are hard, but just because it's hard doesn't mean it's worth it and totally still enjoyable hard, I must say, must be the fact that we've grown. So I was employee 13, we're at 26 now. At 13 we could all still fit in our last office's conference room all around the table, talk about things easily, throw an all hands meeting, make some decisions. With growth, we've had to be very intentional that with transparency we build as we grow, we talk about what that looks like and we're just as transparent as when we started or when I was the 13th person. But when it comes to making decisions, it's now more of a conversation of we probably need a committee for this now. So example like the raises and bonuses committee I was talking about earlier, before it was just Mel and Tom are two co founders making that decision. But now we have a committee that rotates to make sure we're carrying that transparency through in a process. We have now an executive leadership committee that pays attention to the more week to week based finances and make sure we're staying on top of financial and forecasting decisions.

B So it's not a direct democracy, but everyone still has access to information. And so when you try to stay flexible and nimble as you were at four people or 13 people, there's definitely some inherent friction there against Trying to maintain transparency. So we're always trying to balance moving quickly and nimbly for our clients, for our business, for our design work, but also slowing down enough that we're still communicating out our choices, our decisions and our why. And the why is what's most critical. Because even if people are not in the room for every decision, if they understand the why, they still feel tied to every decision that the firm makes.

A What do you find when you get new candidates for WPA that they are most attracted to? Is it just a salary transparency? Is it the overall value set that comes with that? Is it the community aspect? Is it all of the above?

B Without doing an actual survey right this second, I really think it's a mix of it. Most of the feedback I get is that it's the community driven work and also our open transparency. I think a lot of firms right now are trying to dig into community driven work because it's very interesting. And I think when we think about young talent, they're wanting to tie themselves to firms doing community based work. And I think by us having that, but also being open and transparent in our finances and how we talk about business within the firm, I think those together provides our hiring candidates a lot of trust in us. Because it's not just a tagline. We're not just saying we do community based work. They see that internally we're being very transparent and open.

B And I think when you do community driven work, that work also requires a lot of transparency. And so I think it helps them see through and be like, ah, like this firm's trying to really live it fully in the day to day, internally and externally.

A So one of the reasons why I often talk about salary transparency is the discrepancy, right? Or the inequity historically that comes from salaries between men and women even, or due to other demographics. What systems or processes do you have in place to kind of ensure how the raises are determined and how bonuses are determined and what checks and balances do you kind of have in place to make sure that everybody, even in, through the transparency, is, you know, being rewarded for the work that they're doing relative to their peers?

B Yeah, I'm going to try to unpack this one. I'm sorry if it's a little bit redundant redundant because it will tie back to that raises and bonuses committee we have. Sounds so boring. We have Excel sheets. Everyone in the firm, their name goes on that Excel sheet. And then we put on like what type of if. I mean, for the sake of this conversation, we're going to pretend everyone's like an architect. We have other roles here, but let's just for the example, talk about architects.

B Everyone's name's there, what their education is, how many years of experience. And then there's like another column that ties to another tab of the spreadsheet that breaks down like the different roles that all these people within our firm have. It then directly takes out of it the blended roles of, you know, if they're an architect, two what that range is, mean median, lower quartile, upper quartile range, all that stuff. And then if they're also, you know, a project manager, 25% of the time, we include that and it spits out the same mean, median, upper, lower quartile information from that. So we do that for every single person. From that we look at the range and it we have a graph that's produced from that from where their salary currently is. And it then has like a summary tab where we look at everyone side by side. And we.

B Because our raises and bonuses committee meets quarterly, we have a system in place to check that every quarter. Is this person still an architect too? Are they still a project manager? Is this person taking on anything else outside of their roles and responsibilities? And our raises and bonuses committee, it rotates, but there's some key roles within it we have based off our size at 26 now we have two seats reserved for architects. One is half the architects that are more senior level and the other seat is for more junior architects. And that is super intentional because we see the value and younger staff getting that experience. It's not just a split middle each like it's someone more experienced, someone less experienced. We then have an urban designer, someone that represents our administrative side and marketing side and a principal seat and then our director of operations that's responsible for talking to everyone, the firm, and they kind of chair those meetings. So the idea is there's someone on the committee, at least one person that knows what's going on with your work to help advocate for you. And there's also a way for people to advocate for themselves.

B We keep our calendars, surprise transparent. So people know when this meeting is coming. If they want to recommend someone for a bonus, they want to advocate for themselves to get a raise with the why. And that committee talks about it. And to be equitable. I think the biggest thing we make sure to call out is every committee is going to, at some level, inherently be subjective. And I think what's most important to us is we always strive to be equitable. As possible.

B And I think what's most important is we, we do say like, because the process is inherently subjective, we'll try to make it as database as possible. But things may still fall through the cracks or the timing may not be right. Maybe we don't have enough profit to give all the raises at once. But the idea is because the committee rotates, everyone gets a chance. And over time it all balances out because we have this very strict process of looking at it every quarter.

A I wasn't sure what I would get for that answer, but I think it's a lot like in a really good structured way, if that makes sense.

B That's good to hear. It's taken us, you know, we've iterated time after time. It started with, I think after I came on board and I was 13, I heard Mel express like, as CEO, she's like I am. As the firm is growing, she explained she's doing more, you know, high level things less than the day to day. And she expressed that she felt more uncomfortable being in the role of help, of selecting raises, raises for people. And I said, well, why don't we make it a committee now? And so we sat down maybe once or twice and kind of explored what a committee structure would be like, making sure each kind of role in the firm was represented. How often should they meet? We decided on quarterly. And we ultimately decided, like Mel at the time is still responsible for creating the budget for the following years to create those raises and bonuses.

B So it started as simple as that. Each year and through this is now, I know it just came out. This is probably our third or fourth. I think it's third because I'm going to be six years at WPA this November. Our third compensation report that came out each time it kind of forces us to look at how we're doing our Excel sheets and maybe add in another way of looking at the data. So the most recent one for us was blended roles for like two to three years. It was just a singular role. So now it's blended roles.

B So it's an iterative process.

A I mean, I would hope that every process is iterative.

B Right.

A Because there's always room for continuous improvement. So that's kind of also good to hear. You talked about open calendars too. Is there other things that you find is more transparent in WPA and what they do than even maybe your previous firm experiences?

B I think our communication's a lot more open. But truly, I think it's everything I loved the last firm I worked with in its own Way it formed me as a young professional in my path. They taught me a lot. But I think large firms and the profession Even I graduated 2015, even then there's certain structures in way and there's a lot of firms protecting themselves. And I think there's a lot of fear behind this thought that if you provide more transparency people will get upset or just not understand why things the way they are or make things less efficient. And I think from being at WPA at six years, I'm seeing very much like yeah, there's some friction there, but I don't find it to be true. And I know a lot of my own personal values have tied so well to being at wpa. Like I can't think of another firm I would want to work at.

B And I have no regrets at spending the past six years of my professional career at this firm. I know that sounds total like what's the phrase, drinking the Kool Aid, but I'm a very like self reflective person. I like to check in with myself like am I still growing? Am I still interested in what I'm doing? Is this still very much worth like my time? And if there's extra hours like worth the extra hours. And so far the answer is yes. And I think it's going to stay that way because through being this transparent, like you said there's, it makes it so much easier to honestly look at ways we can improve ourselves. And I think when you don't have that transparency, the fear and the unknown makes it too easy to just keep things the same.

A You mentioned that WPA tends to talk about their transparency a lot. What are some of kind of the common questions you get asked in the audience and then love to hear, you know, how do you respond to them as well?

B So the first one we always get is so are people always upset when you talk about salaries? And the answer is no. But yeah, there's going to be a couple conversations that may, you know, may there may be some tension. But we always talk about with our transparency like assume good intent, approach things with curiosity. And so we just what they come with an ask about what their salary is. We just say well let's unpack it, let's make sure we are treating you fairly and that if there is a way to that you need to get a salary increase. We make sure that gets into the next budget or the next time that committee meets. We say another question I get is especially if there's younger people in the audience, they say how do I bring this to my firm when Mel and I present at conferences and stuff. We actually, we want more firms to be radically transparent.

B So we take our Excel forms and we will erase like names and personal information, but we include it in a link or the QR code or we say email us and we give it away like here's what we use. Please see if it makes sense for you and let us know if you do use it. What works, what doesn't work, because we want to know more what other people are doing to also increase transparency in the profession. And then I think the last question that I hear the most often is you all were founded this way, which makes it super easy. Easy in quotes as an already established firm, like what can we do? And I do think I'm seeing it a lot more recently is the answer is the first thing you can do is do an internal audit to set up pay bands. Like if you can't go from 0 to 100, start making those baby steps, set some goals, make sure internally you have a band system, do that equity audit internally, make the corrections and then go public to your firm about it. Start with bans if you can't commit to 100% and then a job role description, why, and then hold yourself accountable to it. And it turns out you can also hold your staff accountable to it too because there's up and down accountability when you're that transparent.

A Let's talk about the speed of decision making in an openly transparent firm, especially as you get larger. So you mentioned that it's not entirely a democracy, but there are these committees in place. So how do you balance the need for efficiency along with the need rather than versus to give everyone that voice they need to be heard in the process.

B Yeah, I think the fact that from our firm's inception there's always been a Tuesday, 10am all staff studio meeting in our offices, living room helps set a pace for being transparent with the firm. So every time there's, you know, if there's an executive team meeting, if there's a marketing meeting, all of those are set and kind of decisions are made. And then I think everyone always thinks about with whatever they're doing. Okay, the studio meeting is coming up on Tuesday. What do I need to share with the rest of the firm so they're in the loop and if it's something happening that needs to happen faster than that weekly pattern, there's this inherent trust that, okay, we're just going to do the best we can to make decisions and then report out to the firm the why and where we are.

A How big do you guys want to get and where does the growth of WPA look like?

B When I joined the firm, we said 15. We obviously did not stick to that. We're at 26 now and we at the time had one office location in Norfolk. We've actually recently expanded to Raleigh, North Carolina. We have two folks who work down there now. And so the answer is, we'll see. I think when we did our last strategic plan, we talked about growth a lot and it was do we grow in one spot or do we explore other markets and grow there? And we decided as a firm to do the latter. We're not sure how big the Norfolk office will get per se.

B I will say there's definitely some physical size limitations to our office right now, but we're always thinking of new ways of doing things. But right now what's most interesting to us is looking at other markets, especially since we do so much community driven work to bring our design and work to other locations. And so right now we're exploring North Carolina and very much looking forward to what Sam and Ray do there.

A You're obviously involved deeply in the aia. I think you're spreading the word about what it means to be a more transparent firm and radical transparency. What is your greater hope for the lessons learned from WPA and its effect that it might have on the profession going forward? When other people think about their firm and their firm culture?

B Yeah. My hope is that firms all over, no matter their size, no matter the work they do, no matter their ownership structure, increase dramatically, increase their transparency and their ability to give access to business information and financial literacy to all staff and their firm, but especially younger staff, to create a long Runway, to learn the business, understand finances, its connection to design. That way our very talented young professionals, young architects in the industry can learn what maybe the default is today so that they can create a different tomorrow that increases the value of architecture and the percussion.

A Hi disruptors. Thank you for joining us today on an episode of Practice Disrupted. If you like the content for today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practiceofarchitecture.com podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers and other disruptors in our community@practiceofarchitecture.com community. Our social media handle is practiceofarch. That's practiceofarch. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to drop us a DM and say hello. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.